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Outstanding orchestras exemplify collective brilliance: cohesive musical expression, unified sound, shared precision. Yet every orchestra is an amalgam of musical personalities and individual performances, each player contributing something distinct, though ultimately subsumed into the whole. The smaller the group, the keener the tension between soloists and ensemble.
The Australian Chamber Orchestras second national tour for the year aims to unravel this relationship, placing four string section principals under the solo spotlight.
Framing this concept were rarely heard miniatures by Franz Schreker, an Austrian composer whose compositional career straddled Vienna's divergent late 19th and early 20th-century musical strands.
Early works, Sehreker's Scherzo and Intermezzo embody late romantic and nationalist preoccupations: from lilting folk tune paraphrases, ethereal atmospherics and pastoral dances to the breathless momentum of arching phrases that soar between grandeur, melancholy and foreboding. In each, the ensemble demonstrated its celebrated capacity for intensity and depth of tone, sustained phrasing and dynamic contrast.
The highlight arrived early: guest artist Diana Doherty rendering Ralph Vaughan Williams's Oboe Concerto with sublime pathos, capturing the wartime work's equivocation between restless energy and weary introspection. Disregarding Doherty's distracting physical punctuations, the sound was superb, even tone and exquisite dynamic control combining with crisp fingering and faultless articulation to deliver rich expression and technical precision in equal measure.
Opportunities for the lower string soloists involved Timo-Veikko Valve executing a scintillatingly crisp rendition of C. P.E. Bach's Cello Concerto in A minor, and Maxime Bibeau energetically premiering a commission by Australian composer Matthew Hindson.
Entitled Crime and Punishment, this work casts the double bass as a marginalised criminal, and the ensemble as modern-day, punishment-obsessed Greek chorus. A frenzied solo part hints at subtext, heavily exploiting contrasts between the instrument's shadowy, rumbling lower registers and the piercing, urgent clarity of its highest notes: a voice of tragedy emerging from a sinister and oppressive underbelly.
Benjamin Britten's Lachrymae is a spiritual exercise of reflection and lament, requiring timbral subtlety, balance and sustained lines rather than showy virtuosity. Violist Christopher Moore's interpretation was moving in its simplicity, humility and delicacy, wisps of hushed melancholy lingering in the air.
A good-natured rendition of J. S. Bach's Concerto for Violin and Oboe concluded proceedings, Helena Rathbone's sweetly focused tone and easy execution sitting comfortably alongside Doherty's warm and expansive treatment of this popular concerto.
Eamonn Kelly | The Australian | 18 Mar 2010
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